Hello, folks, this is your captain speaking. We’ve reached the halfway mark in our journey to noveldom. There’s been some minor turbulence along the way but we’re in blue skies now.

Almost.

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Project: Black Mirror

New words written: 2,421

Reason for stopping: End of day

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In this hot mess of first draft spagetti and a generous serving of cheese, I’m learning a lot. One being that I’m frighteningly close to the climax of the story and that the later part of the month will see me going back through and filling in things that I skipped over. Subplots and minor characters left off-screen need care and attention, because they are interesting and still trapped inside my head.

The other thing that I’ve done poorly is setting. I think it’s true of most stories, but especially so of Urban Fantasy, is that setting is character and, as characters go, I’ve made mine pretty bland so far. A large part of that was the lack of preparation. I wish I had a nice big map of the city printed out and tiled over my desk, with sticky notes to visualize this world like a giant pastel event wheel.

Lastly, I’ll be continuing with the reverse outlining as I go, straightening out my chapters and weaving together my various points of view. I swore off any rewriting or deleting during Nano but there are new scenes I’ve discovered through this process. I’ve had that panicked moment realizing that I was nearing the end as far as chapters go, but one saving grace for writing this out of order is that there are still plenty of words left to write.